Disease, advancing age, and trauma can lead to changes in various bones, discs, joints, and ligaments of the body. Some changes and trauma often manifest themselves in the form of damage or degeneration to a spinal disc and/or the spacing between adjacent vertebral bodies. These conditions often result in chronic back pain, which can be anywhere from mild to severe. This pain can sometimes be eliminated by surgical techniques to effect spinal fusion or a dynamic solution. Spinal fusion involves joining together two adjacent vertebral bodies by fixing with hardware and/or causing bone to grow therebetween. Dynamic surgical solutions involve surgically installing devices such as artificial discs, spinous process spacers, facet joint prostheses, and flexible pedicle screw systems. Although effective, the dynamic solutions require major surgery and rigid systems, such as fusion devices, reduce mobility.
One example of a dynamic solution is a spinous process spacer attached to the spinous process of the vertebrae. These spacers are implanted with minimal destruction of tissue and without the need for pedicle screws or other devices that require bony destruction for attachment to the vertebrae. While the spinous process spacers provide some improvements over the system using pedicle screws, the spinous process is a weak structural part of the vertebrae that can be prone to breakage, especially with the excess load applied when the spacers are inserted to augment the adjacent vertebrae.
Accordingly, there is a need for improved systems that can repair damaged and/or diseased spinal tissue by augmenting the natural anatomy. There is further need for such systems and devices that can be implanted through minimally invasive surgery.